Help on choosing truncation distance and binning strategy

[C. Canonne]

Hello DS community,

I would appreciate your advice on choosing truncation distance and binning strategy for detection function analyses, especially given the strong heaping I observe in the tail of my distance data.

I am currently working with three different datasets. I may eventually combine them on the subset of shared sites, but for now I am fitting detection functions separately on each full dataset.

My main issue is that estimated density changes substantially when I modify the truncation threshold, making results highly sensitive to the chosen cutoff.

In the attached HTML file:

• section 2 shows the raw distance distributions by dataset (full season vs July only),

• section 3 contains some diagnostic plots that may be helpful.

I would especially welcome recommendations on:

• choosing truncation distance and number of bins,

• and whether variable bin widths (e.g. larger bins in the tail) would help with the heaping pattern.

Best regards,
Coline Canonne